New housing projects in the first 10 months of this year totaled more than NT$980 billion (US$31.44 billion) in northern Taiwan, with presale projects accounting for 85.5 percent, unfazed by legislative efforts to ban their resale, My Housing Monthly (住展雜誌) reported.
Increasing building material prices and labor shortages have prompted developers to slow construction on housing projects and delay their entry to the market, which would further widen the gap, the Chinese-language magazine said.
“Presale projects continue to dominate the new housing market one year after the introduction of bills to ban resale of presale contracts,” magazine research manager Chen Tsai-chi (成采錡) said.
Photo: Hsu Yi-ping, Taipei Times
The bills are intended to cool the property market, as housing prices have soared throughout Taiwan in the past two years on the back of an economic boom and firms shifting manufacturing facilities home from China amid US-China trade tensions, Chen said.
However, the legislature has not made any progress on the bills and might not pursue the efforts in the coming months as an economic slowdown and monetary tightening dampen buying interest, Chen said.
As of last month, presale projects in northern Taiwan totaled NT$844.5 billion, leaving newly completed houses a small share of 14.5 percent, or NT$143 billion, the magazine said.
The Hsinchu area has the lowest ratio of newly completed houses, at 3 percent, or NT$4.17 billion versus presale projects at NT$140 billion, as strong demand amid limited supply left buyers no choice but to target presale projects, it said.
Developers have aggressively launched presale projects in Hsinchu to meet fast-growing demand from cash-flush technology engineers, it added.
Newly completed houses account for 10.8 percent of the market in Taoyuan, which has a total volume of NT$285.1 billion, it said.
In Taipei, presale projects totaled NT$205.3 billion in the first 10 months, while newly completed houses rose 6.2 percentage points to NT$44.24 billion, or a 21.5 percent market share, due to the release of a luxury residential complex in Zhongzheng District (中正), it said.
Newly completed houses totaled NT$57.4 billion, or 17.9 percent of the NT$320 billion new housing market in New Taipei City, it said, adding that the ratio fell 3.4 percentage points from a year earlier.
Newly completed houses shed 11 percentage points to 16.8 percent in Yilan County, while dropping 9.1 percentage points to 18.1 percent in Keelung, it said.
The difference between presale projects and newly completed houses is expected to grow, as developers and builders postpone construction to cope with rising costs, a practice that would shrink the pool of newly completed houses, Chen said.
SEMICONDUCTOR SERVICES: A company executive said that Taiwanese firms must think about how to participate in global supply chains and lift their competitiveness Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) yesterday said it expects to launch its first multifunctional service center in Pingtung County in the middle of 2027, in a bid to foster a resilient high-tech facility construction ecosystem. TSMC broached the idea of creating a center two or three years ago when it started building new manufacturing capacity in the US and Japan, the company said. The center, dubbed an “ecosystem park,” would assist local manufacturing facility construction partners to upgrade their capabilities and secure more deals from other global chipmakers such as Intel Corp, Micron Technology Inc and Infineon Technologies AG, TSMC said. It
NO BREAKTHROUGH? More substantial ‘deliverables,’ such as tariff reductions, would likely be saved for a meeting between Trump and Xi later this year, a trade expert said China launched two probes targeting the US semiconductor sector on Saturday ahead of talks between the two nations in Spain this week on trade, national security and the ownership of social media platform TikTok. China’s Ministry of Commerce announced an anti-dumping investigation into certain analog integrated circuits (ICs) imported from the US. The investigation is to target some commodity interface ICs and gate driver ICs, which are commonly made by US companies such as Texas Instruments Inc and ON Semiconductor Corp. The ministry also announced an anti-discrimination probe into US measures against China’s chip sector. US measures such as export curbs and tariffs
The US on Friday penalized two Chinese firms that acquired US chipmaking equipment for China’s top chipmaker, Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp (SMIC, 中芯國際), including them among 32 entities that were added to the US Department of Commerce’s restricted trade list, a US government posting showed. Twenty-three of the 32 are in China. GMC Semiconductor Technology (Wuxi) Co (吉姆西半導體科技) and Jicun Semiconductor Technology (Shanghai) Co (吉存半導體科技) were placed on the list, formally known as the Entity List, for acquiring equipment for SMIC Northern Integrated Circuit Manufacturing (Beijing) Corp (中芯北方積體電路) and Semiconductor Manufacturing International (Beijing) Corp (中芯北京), the US Federal Register posting said. The
India’s ban of online money-based games could drive addicts to unregulated apps and offshore platforms that pose new financial and social risks, fantasy-sports gaming experts say. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government banned real-money online games late last month, citing financial losses and addiction, leading to a shutdown of many apps offering paid fantasy cricket, rummy and poker games. “Many will move to offshore platforms, because of the addictive nature — they will find alternate means to get that dopamine hit,” said Viren Hemrajani, a Mumbai-based fantasy cricket analyst. “It [also] leads to fraud and scams, because everything is now
RSS